Brazil Island is a conspicuously complex problem. Probably it
represents the region around the Gulf of St. Lawrence, brought on the
same parallel unduly near the Irish shore. Thus understood, it would
be, presumably, but not necessarily, the cartographic record of some
early Irish voyage far to the westward. It does not appear on any
extant map before 1325, but maps showing the Atlantic and its remoter
islands (apart from the hopeless distortions of Edrisi and certain
monks) can hardly be said to have existed earlier.
Man, or Mayda, is frequently a more southern and western companion of
Brazil Island on the old maps and may stand for Bermuda or for some
jutting point, like Cape Cod, on the American coast. Some indications
connect it with the Bretons, some with the Arabs. It has borne divers
names. We cannot tell who first found and reported it.
The Island of the Seven Cities derived its name from a very credible
Spanish and Portuguese tradition of escape from the Moors by sea early
in the eighth century. It may first have been localized as St. Michaels
of the Azores, where a valley still bears the name. Afterward it was
confused for a long time with Antillia and still later was distributed
rather widely over sea and land, the Seven Cities not always insisting
on being insular but appearing now just back of the American Atlantic
coast line, now in the far and arid Southwest.
Of the Norse discoveries in America at the opening of the eleventh
century, Helluland represents the northern treeless waste of upper
Labrador and beyond; Markland represents the forested zone next below,
notably Newfoundland, with probably southern Labrador supplying only
timber and game; and Vinland, or Wineland, represents all that immense
region where the climate was milder and wine grapes grew. Straumey was
Grand Manan Island; Straumfiord, Passamaquoddy Bay with Grand Manan
Channel; Hop, Mount Hope Bay, R. I., or some bay of the eastern front
of southern New England; the Wonderstrands, some part of the prevalent
American coastal front of unending strand and dune. It is needless to
particularize further.
Antillia is Cuba; Reylla, Jamaica; Salvagio, or Satanaxio, Florida; I
in Mar, one or more of the Bahamas. Early in the fifteenth century some
Iberian navigator, probably Portuguese, visited these islands and made
the report that resulted in the addition of these islands to divers
maps. They, in turn, were among the inciting causes of the undertaking
of Columbus.
FOOTNOTES
[1] The Historical Library of Diodorus the Sicilian, in 15 Books, to
which are added the fragments of Diodorus, and those published by H.
Valesius, I. Rhodomannus, and F. Ursinus, transl. by G. Booth, Esq., 2
vols., London, 1814; reference in Vol. 1, Bk. 3, Ch. 4, p. 195, and Bk.
4, Ch. 1, pp. 235 and 243.
[2] A. E. Nordenskiöld: Facsimile-Atlas to the Early History of
Cartography, transl. by J. A. Ekelöf and C. R. Markham, Stockholm,
1889, p. 131.
[3] I Kings, 10: 22.
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